• Projective methods are powerful tools to gain the voice of individuals and explore aspects of their experience that may not be well understood. When carefully analysed and triangulated with other sources of information, projective methods can open up conversations with children, adults, families and staff that can facilitate deep understanding of difficulties, and help to create change.
• Projective methods sit within the psychodynamic tradition, which postulates that we all have a ‘dynamic unconscious’ with drives and desires that affect everything we do. Therefore, trying to understand the unconscious and inner world of individuals can help us to understand their behaviour (Frosh, 2002).
• Projective methods are ideographic tools used to explore how both adults and children make sense of themselves in the relational world. Most projective tests, therefore, are constructed using deliberately ambiguous stimuli onto which the subject will ‘project’ unconscious attributions, beliefs and values. While a psychometric or nomothetic orientation puts the test centre stage by assessing according to predetermined patterns or traits, projective methods put the client centre stage by giving space to understand the client in their complexity and uniqueness (Kennedy & Eastwood, 2021). The neutral stimulus of the test provides a non-threatening way for the person to express something of their internal world, of which they may or may not be consciously aware.
• Projective methods can function as performance-based measures of social-emotional functioning providing a sample of how someone views themselves, their environment and significant others. This is seen through their performance on the test, as well as how they interact with the assessor and the assessment situation. Where in psychometric testing the assessor can be seen as a source of possible bias and error, in projective methods the assess or is part of the process and is a source of information (Kennedy & Eastwood,2021).
• Ideographic measures have a long history of unpopularity within the academic and therapeutic communities, particularly in the UK, in favour of more standardised tools (Chandler, 1994). However, there is increasing acknowledgement of the need for theoretically well-grounded assessment tools which give space for the unique representation of the self (Binney & Wright, 1997). Projective measures are more popular in other countries around the world and are used by school psychologists in the USA (King, 2017).
• Common projective techniques include sentence completions tasks, drawing techniques, story-telling techniques, ink-blot tests, play, free association and the analysis of dreams.

Binney, V. & Wright, J. C. (1997). The Bag of Feelings: An Ideographic Technique for theAssessment and Exploration of Feelings in Children and Adolescents. Clinical ChildPsychology and Psychiatry, 2(3), 449-462.

Chandler, L.A. (2003). The projective hypothesis and the development of projectivetechniques for children. In C. R. Reynolds & R.W. Kamphaus (Eds.),Handbook ofpsychological and educational assessment of children: Personality, behavior, and context.New York: Guilford.

King, R. (2017). An exploration of the use of projective techniques by educationalpsychologists in the UK (Unpublished doctoral thesis)

Frosh (2002). Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis. London: British Library.

Kennedy, L., & Eastwood, L. Educational psychology assessment: a psychoanalytic approach. In Learning from the Unconscious: psychoanalytic approaches in Educational Psychology, edited by Christopher Arnold et al, Confer Ltd. 2021.